Field of the Art
The disclosure relates to the field of contact center operations, and more particularly to the field of interactive voice response systems and applications.
Discussion of the State of the Art
In the field of interactive voice response (IVR) systems, documenting systems “as-is”, or in their current state such as to document possible voice responses and interaction paths a customer might take while navigating a system, can be very time consuming, sometimes requiring as much as 3-9 months to completely document a single system. Consequently, documentation is often out of sync with production systems due to the time and resources required, decreasing the effectiveness of the documentation. Generating documentation scripts manually can also be time consuming, making it difficult to economize the process. The result of these factors is that agility is compromised, and time-to-value can be over a year.
Additionally, outdated or poorly maintained IVR software may persist in use due to difficulty migrating to new systems or performing maintenance manually (for example, to identify broken paths or outdated options that need to be fixed or removed). Companies may have a large investment in a particular IVR configuration, and may wish to maintain their existing setup but also to take advantage of new technologies that may become available. Generally, this would require manually setting up a new IVR system and taking care to configure it in a similar manner to the existing configuration. Manually inspecting or setting up a new IVR system is time consuming and error-prone, which leads to outdated systems being kept operational rather than upgrading, due to the investment required. It is also important for users to be able to perform minor changes without the risk of causing larger issues, for example to enable users to correct minor issues as they appear without running the risk of breaking larger call flows.
What is needed, is a means to rapidly and reliably generate documentation of, and test cases for, production IVR systems to at least accelerate deployment and time-to-value (for example, for existing systems), as well as to generate VXML suitable for rapid importation into an IVR system, and to generate interactive IVR documentation to enable users to view and modify an IVR in a safe and efficient manner.